


paper and clay

by Feather (lalaietha)



Series: (even if i could) make a deal with god [your blue-eyed boys related short-fic] [124]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Bucky gets a hobby, Good Days, M/M, Origami, pottery, recovery is a spiral
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-05
Updated: 2017-08-05
Packaged: 2018-12-11 15:41:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,682
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11717406
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lalaietha/pseuds/Feather
Summary: The origami is deliberate. The pottery is an accident.





	paper and clay

**Author's Note:**

> This fic is part of [**this series**](http://archiveofourown.org/series/132585), which is for short-fic associated with my fic [**your blue-eyed boys**](http://archiveofourown.org/series/107477), because I needed somewhere to stash it.
> 
> I swear I am getting caught up on comments! I am. For realsies. >.>

The origami is deliberate. It's something that gets picked up, on purpose, to serve a purpose. And it started because of a fight.

The fight was about Bucky not absently ripping his right-hand fingernails off in his left arm because he was agitated and digging them into the grooves. Steve pointed out he was doing it, Bucky tried to brush him off and say it wasn't anything important, Steve pointed out that he'd ripped himself up three times already this week, and so on. They'd gone back and forth for a few minutes on whether or not this was even important enough for Steve to be paying attention to, moving into Steve saying he was going to keep paying attention even if it wasn't.

Then Bucky had snapped, _Fine, fucking find me something_ else _to fucking do with my fucking God-damned hands then!_

Steve had, although admittedly not exactly the way Bucky meant. Or maybe it was. 

In the short term, that lead to them knocking the lamp off the side-table and breaking it, as well as knocking the side-table over and ripping Steve's shirt. And that was definitely not a problem. But on the other hand it's not a _permanent_ solution. There are definitely times when it's nowhere near as appropriate. 

And the whole thing stuck in his head, because in the long-run Bucky had a point. It's way, way less useful to just point out that a bad habit's there but do nothing else; it works better to point it out _and_ offer a diversion, whether it's your own habit or someone else's. 

A lot of the things you can do pretty easily with your hands while doing other things with your attention are off the table, though. For instance, it's not like theraputic colouring is gonna work. The opposite, actually. Bucky can actually render pretty damn good sketches of people and locations at this point, and even shade through colour, but it's not exactly a process that has comforting associations. 

Being able to provide photos of a scene or a person by carrying something small and unobtrusive in your pocket is a pretty recent invention, and before that, well . . . sketch could be just as useful, and it's not like he could lie. 

Since _before_ HYDRA, basically all Bucky could manage were respectable stick-figures, simple and mostly readable maps, and more or less showing three dimensions in a square, the much higher skill he has now is clearly something they forced him to learn. And it's not like he's got any particular natural drive to reclaim it, since it wasn't his thing, it was, _is_ Steve's thing - art, visual art, was Steve's wheelhouse. Is Steve's wheelhouse. 

So colouring's out. 

And it just so happens they both know how to knit and sew, but neither of them's ever _liked_ it much. Plus, as a fiddly hobby, knitting means having to buy yarn and ending up with whatever you've knit, and he and Bucky haven't got all that much use for things you can knit. They don't have a lot of things to mend these days, either: Steve's clothes either last okay or it's the fabric itself giving out, not seams or buttons, and the extent of mending some of the holes Bucky makes on bad days just ends up with a patch that annoys him. So it's pointless. 

And making new stuff hits the same problem as knitting, especially since it's just about as expensive to get fabric as soft as is useful for Bucky, for clothes, as it is to just buy them. And nobody they know knits, so there's not much point in picking up spinning.

Most things hit a similar problem, actually. Set of problems. _Don't really enjoy it_ plus _having to get stuff for it_ plus _ending up with Stuff in the end that you don't want._

Even carving - Steve's gut-impulse, when it comes to the kind of wood-carving you can do while watching TV, is that it'd irritate Bucky more than anything. Because that's not what knives are for. Steve's willing to trust his instincts on that one. And anything more than that is a whole set of new tools and space for them and once again becomes a big thing. 

It doesn't escape Steve's notice that a lot of the activities he can think of in terms of this kind of thing are pretty gendered, and gendered female. He's not even willing to swear that their shared residual distaste at the idea of doing a lot of them - like knitting and sewing - doesn't come from that, from the boys they'd been when they learned. 

Neither of them had any sisters, Bucky hated being dependent on cousins' or aunts' good will, and Steve didn't even have any of those: they'd _had_ to learn to do some things, but it wasn't like it was fun or something they wanted. 

It's almost a cliche, how when you were the only child and you were a girl, you had to learn the stuff boys did; the secret nobody talks about - then or now - is that it went the other way, too, because your mother still probably needed a second set of hands, just like all those little girls whose dads needed the same.

So there was stuff they had to learn. Like cooking, except that cooking done right gives you something you want out the end of it. On top of everything else, "sewing" meant mending or hemming or refitting something second-hand to make it new, because you couldn't afford new, and "knitting" meant the cheapest yarn that was still warm, and usually ugly at that. It all came in very useful on the Front, he'll freely admit - God knows Dum-Dum couldn't darn his own socks and there weren't always a lot of socks to go around - but that's not exactly happy-comforting memories either. 

And sure it doesn't have to have those connotations, but on the other hand it's probably more work than it's worth to get rid of them. The point here was looking for something to _easily_ replace the habit that ended with torn fingernails and blood, not for another thing to work at. 

Bucky has enough damn things to work at.

Steve ends up seeing the first origami kit in a hobby shop that happened to open the next week about twenty minutes' walk from their place, and figures it's worth a try. Paper doesn't take up much room, it's easy to get rid of afterwards, sure the kits come with expensive paper but you can use anything you can make a square out of, and the most you could come up with for associations is a vague tie to Jim, although it's the kind of thing Jim probably would have looked at and shaken his head and muttered something in Japanese. 

So the next time he pointed out to Bucky that he was in danger of ripping his nails off, Steve also dug the kit out of the closet and tossed it over. Said, "I _did_ find you something else to do with your hands," and got a disgusted look for it. 

Then the kit got the disgusted look, and Bucky pointed at the picture on the front and demanded, "In what God-damned world is this a fox?" 

Talking about it like that means he has to try it, of course, so he can prove that not only is that fox a stupid-looking fox, but it's easy to make, so he can imply it'd be relatively easy to make a better fox. It's all cover, but they both know it's all cover, and hey: it works. 

It's about a week later that it strikes Steve that it's also a good but invisible way of demonstrating to Bucky, over and over, that he's not automatically going to hurt or kill someone with his left arm, and that's _not_ all it's for. It's something he still wavers on, back and forth, to the point where now Steve can use it as a cue to where Bucky's head's really at, times when he's doing a good job of pretending it's not there. 

Not that Steve's going to point it out or make an issue of it without a reason, because sometimes the person Bucky's pretending that for is himself, but Steve still feels a lot better about it if _he_ knows, so he can adjust accordingly. 

Steve's thought more than once that the people who used to think they knew each other disturbingly well before would have to make up new words to even talk about how they know each other now. These days they really can have a full conversation without actually having to speak and each of them knows the other's twitches and tells to a kind of insane degree - Bucky because his head won't let him _not_ , and Steve because if he doesn't, the ugly stuff lurking in the back of Bucky's head makes them both sorry. 

Fortunately everyone who knows them well enough to be kinda aware of that has more than enough of a clue in general - often from personal experience - than to air any opinions on whether that meets the standard definition of "healthy", the kind that means "normal", so Steve's never had to rip a strip off anyone. It's not one-sided, the whole point is that overall it makes Bucky _better_ able to handle stuff on his own, and that's as much as Steve's even willing to talk about it. Or hypothetically talk about it, since nobody brings it up, because nobody's stupid. 

And in the end, the origami sort of works. It's fiddly, but it's not all that complicated; it has no actual purpose, so crumpling one up and throwing the ball of paper out doesn't mean actually wrecking something that was supposed to do something else. Not even potentially. And paper is reasonably cheap and also easy to recycle, which means Bucky can stick a wrench in the works of guilt trying to work itself up about "waste". On the other hand, there's a certain amount of challenge to getting it Right that means he doesn't get totally bored. So it more or less works. 

The final upside is that the kitten likes chasing the balls of paper around until they get somewhere they stop making noise, so she can't find them. Then she gets really confused, which is kinda hilarious to watch, right up to the point she turns around in whatever direction she thinks Bucky is, sits down, and makes this really irritated sounding yowl that clearly means _human fix it._ Whatever "it" is. 

It's always deliberate, though. Bucky never gets to the point where reaching for it to keep from doing something else is automatic, and it's not something he's got any interest in doing just by itself. When it comes down to it (Steve says to Sam), it's not really a hobby, it's a behavioural redirect, and that only goes so far. 

 

The pottery's a bit more organic, and a lot more surprising. 

 

It starts with Elizabeth sending both of them a link to some guy who makes miniature pottery. Very miniature pottery. 

Steve doesn't entirely see the point. It's very impressive and all, but it's not like anyone has a use for pottery that small. The level of skill and time and work and all that makes it a bit expensive for, say, decorating a doll's house which is basically all you could do with them. 

Bucky finds the video way more interesting than Steve does, though. That evening, when they're sprawled on the couch and Steve's idly channel surfing before he gives up and goes back to Netflix and _Cosmos_ , he notices that what Bucky's flicking around looking at on the tablet are a bunch more pages on the miniature pottery, and then some on pottery in general. 

Steve doesn't think much of it, until a couple days later there's a hard-copy of a book called _The Potter's Bible_. It's a big one, hardcover with a spiral spine, and Bucky spends a reasonable part of the day reading it, book open on the coffee-table and the kitten either on his shoulder, curled up by his hip, or on the page he's not reading right at that moment. Or sometimes on the page he _is_ reading, but then he picks her up and puts her on his shoulder. 

It's calm and quiet and Bucky seems perfectly happy and focused, so Steve just pulls out the water-colour he's working on. 

The next day Bucky apparently reads the pottery book through again, this time with one of his notebooks and messy scribble of notes. 

Bucky is perfectly capable of making the most legible Cyrillic cursive Steve's seen yet. As far as Steve can tell, his insistence on not bothering is the closest Bucky can get to a silent, resentful _fuck you_ to the people who forced him to learn how, and also as far as Steve can tell the part where Bucky's handwriting in English doesn't look like it used to disturbs him even more than it sometimes throws Steve, so he avoids it if he can. Accordingly, Steve keeps his mouth shut on the entire subject. It's a bit frustrating, since handwriting used to be something they both gave each other endless grief about, but that's the nature of the universe, Steve supposes.

He decides, on balance, not to comment. On any of it. 

The book is a loan from the Tower library, and after Bucky's filled about three quarters of a notebook on it, it goes back and Steve doesn't see it again. 

For a while, he doesn't see anything else about pottery or ceramics or any of that, and he figures the brief obsessive interest burned itself out. That happens sometimes. Maybe Bucky just realized he didn't know as much as he thought he should know about how stoneware works, or something, and felt the need to fix it. 

Steve doesn't worry about it much. 

 

Bucky doesn't really buy things very often. 

He has his own cards, bank and credit. It's something where Steve gave in and asked Pepper if there was some way that someone could sort of make that happen without Bucky actually having to go in and deal with a bank, and she asked who the accountant was that Natasha had sorted Steve out with however long ago. Steve gave her the name and number. 

Then some strange financial witchcraft ensued, and the cards arrived attached to Steve's accounts in Bucky's name and it hadn't been a problem. 

("Thank you," he'd said. "A lot. And sorry I bothered you - I'd've just asked Tony about it, but - " he'd sort of stalled out, trying to think through how to explain how Tony's method of Helping in this case probably . . . wouldn't've been. 

"I completely understand," Pepper had assured him. "Besides, honestly: it's nice to have simple problems for friends that I can solve without even having to make international phone-calls, or delegate twelve staff-members to do that for me. It lets me feel accomplished at the end of my day.")

But even so, Bucky tends to maybe pick up a couple of twenties from the cash that Steve keeps around the house (and never straight out of Steve's wallet) and go through those as slowly as possible - mostly only on food when he's out of the house and the timer goes off, or water, or stuff like that. Unless he's getting stuff for the condo - that is, for both of them to use, groceries, stuff for the cat - Bucky otherwise just avoids buying anything. 

It keeps from throwing any potential issues with money into relief, so Steve doesn't push at it too much. Not that there's any reasonable reason for there to be any issues, but that's not how minds work about money and it's not even like that doesn't catch _him_ sometimes. Maybe someday it'll be something that has to be dealt with, but again: they've got a lot of those. This one can wait. 

So it's kind of a surprise the day Steve comes home and Bucky's sitting on the floor between the living-room and the kitchen, with a package of what turns out to be air-dry clay, messing around with what turns out to be a coil pot. Except he gets frustrated with it before it's finished, smushing it all back together into a bowl and putting it in an air-tight container. 

Then he half-heartedly tries to pick a fight about whether or not it's worth going out of the building, until Steve turns it around and needles him into coming for a walk. He's a bit proud of that. 

After supper Bucky pulls out the clay again. And gets frustrated and smashes it again. When he closes up the container and half-throws, half-pushes it across the coffee-table away from him, Steve lets the book he's reading close around his finger. 

"What're you trying to do?" he asks, because at this point it's probably safe. 

"Fucking stupid mini-pottery shit stuck in my head," Bucky says, voice full of disgust. Abrikoska makes a half-swallowed half-purr-half-meow noise and jumps down from her house onto the arm of the futon, from the arm to the back of the cushion. As Bucky turns to stretch out along the futon, she crawls up onto his chest so she can head-butt his cheek and demand he pet her until she curls up against his neck on the front of his shoulder. 

"That's not the kind of clay he was using," Steve points out, after weighing for a bit whether or not he wants to go there. "So it's not going to work the same." 

"I know that," Bucky says, irritable. But it is _irritable_ , cranky rather than tense, so Steve decides to poke at it. Since it's obviously . . . something. After all, Bucky went all the way to buying something, even if it wasn't what he really wants. 

"So you should maybe try with some that is the same," Steve says, reasonably. 

"No," Bucky retorts, immediately, the irritable ratcheting up. But it's still irritable and not tense or sharp. 

So Steve asks, "Why not?" 

Bucky shoots him a dire look. "You need a wheel and shit to work with that bullshit," he says. 

"So?" Steve pushes, even though the answer is obvious. Because Steve rejects that answer. 

"So what?" Bucky dodges. 

"So you should get a wheel and stuff," Steve says, reasonably. 

" _No,_ " Bucky snaps, glaring at him, like Steve knew he would. 

He's not going to get Bucky to agree that he should get it out loud: he already knows that. This is just . . .part of a process. It lets the whole idea get brought up once to start with, all wrapped up in cranky and crabby instead of having to take it seriously. Steve doesn't know why that helps, but it does. He even knows how it helps on his own side, sometimes. So they do it. 

It's kind of absurd, but Steve's not sure anymore that there's anything about human behaviour that isn't. 

"Why not?" he asks. 

"Because," Bucky snaps. 

They are officially past the point of Absurd and well into Totally Ridiculous, but on the other hand, Steve notes they haven't yet hit the point where Bucky's actually using the dodges that sort of half-pretend to acquiesce, or where he starts saying _maybe_ , or the _yeah sure whatever_ that actually means _not on your life_ or anything, which are the things he uses when he actually needs out of the argument, now. 

So Steve says, "Because why?" 

"Fuck you, Steve," Bucky says, glaring at him, "you know why." 

"Well I've got some possibilities," Steve says, "but there's more than one of them, so - " 

All in one movement, Bucky sits up, puts the kitten down on the coffee-table and hucks the cushion hard at Steve's head. Steve ducks, but it doesn't help because Bucky's already reached across to grab the other cushion off the futon, and thrown it into the space Steve's moving into, hitting him half in the head anyway. 

So Steve snags the cushion beside him and lashes out at Bucky's leg. 

The kitten retreats, annoyed, to the top of her other cat-tree, as they both end up on the floor. They manage to avoid either of them getting brained or otherwise bruised by the coffee-table. In the end, Steve loses, eventually having to actually call _uncle_ because there's no way he's getting anywhere without one or both of them getting hurt. 

Bucky lets his arm go, and Steve lets himself roll over onto his back, Bucky sitting on his hips and giving him a look that's half triumph and half a frown. 

"You're getting sloppy," Bucky says, critically, and Steve heads that off with a shake of his head and a prod to Bucky's knee. That conversation is coming, he has to admit that, but it's not coming _right now_. Not if he can help it. Now is not the time. 

"Don't try changing the subject," he says, and then fends off Bucky's not-particularly-serious attempts to push his face to the side with his open right hand. "Can _I_ go get a wheel and stuff?" he asks, because it's not like he has any objection to doing that if it'll work. 

Bucky makes a noise of irritation and, more effectively, also shifts his weight, leans over Steve with his left hand beside Steve's head. 

"Shut the fuck up, Steve," he says and _admittedly_ ending conversations you don't want to have by resorting to kissing does work just as well on Steve as the other way around. Except that it's not a _no_. 

So the conversation might be over, but that doesn't mean Steve lost. 

 

Steve stops by the youth and community centre, because he knows from when he donated the unneeded art supplies that they have pottery classes and a kiln. 

It's the same lady behind the desk as it was when he last dropped stuff off, and she brightens as he comes in, which honestly is always kind of nice. He still gives her a slightly self-deprecating smile. 

"Sorry, no stuff today," he says, and she makes a face at him. 

"It's nice to see people _regardless_ ," she says, in a slightly scolding voice. "Nicer, even." 

She's older, maybe in her late forties, and her curly hair has solid threads of silver here and there. The glasses on a string around her neck are bifocals, though right now they're perched on top of her head and kind of holding her hair back from her face. He thinks her name is Gloria. 

She asks him how he is, and he asks how the centre's doing, and eventually gets around to asking her if someone could give him some advice on pottery stuff. This leads to him being introduced to the guy who does pottery, an older Filipino man who has the look of someone who basically lives in his studio and doesn't seem to own any clothing that doesn't have clay spots on it. 

About twenty minutes and more than Steve has ever wanted to know about clay later, he does have the name of a specific kind of table-top electric motor wheel, plus directions where to find the right kind of clay, and an invitation to sign up for a spot to use the centre's kiln with a centre membership. 

He escapes when one of the teenagers in the room asks a question about the coil-y thing she's working on. 

 

Steve isn't particularly worried when the wheel and the box of the prepared clay sit more or less ignored beside the computer desk for the first three or four days. Or when it's clear they've both been opened, the clay moved into a tupperware container and probably used, but are back right where they were any time he, Steve, is actually home. 

It takes a lot of restraint to keep from pointing out that there are actual proper sets of tools you can buy, as Steve watches a small ziplock bag on top of the tupperware start to accumulate odds and ends. They're mostly - as far as Steve can tell - either the bamboo disposable knives and spoons that come from the BBQ food truck Bucky will most frequently actually eat from, or stuff kind of carved or adapted from those, or wooden chopsticks, or stuff made out of either of the above. Plus what kind of looks like one of Natasha's makeup sponge-things, a couple of untwisted paperclips, and a dismantled part of a string-and-jingle toy that for some reason Abrikoska's never been interested in. 

The internet informs Steve that as long as you don't actually bake it, you can always just throw this kind of clay back in the container you keep it in and start over. And that if it dries out all you have to do is, basically, humidify it again. 

That kind of strikes him as . . . helpful. If Bucky's not happy with how something turns out, he can just make it go away, and he hasn't wasted anything except possibly his own time. It can be more or less like it never happened. It's a small and not really important, but Steve reflects that it's probably nice to, for once, _not_ have to Deal With The Consequences. 

Of, well, anything. 

 

On his own, Steve goes back to the video Elizabeth sent. This time he watches with an eye to figuring out what it is that got such a tight hold on Bucky's interest. 

It's the kind of thing where Steve feels like he has to turn his perspective upside down or turn it sideways a couple of times before it finally clicks into place. That happens sometimes - and not just the obvious stuff, like turning how the power-flows of the whole world work upside down and sideways, or making himself (for as few seconds as possible) picture a world wherein Bucky's health and well-being and everything else really are irrelevant and expendable. 

There's also stuff like, well, this - because in the end Steve comes to the tentative conclusion that the thing that made it stick in Bucky's brain is that he probably couldn't figure out, right away, how you'd actually do it. How shaping the clay worked. Not exactly. 

Steve's not sure he could explain it very well outside his own head, but pottery comes down to movement, to making part of your body affect a malleable material. Bucky's really used to knowing exactly how his body works, how it moves to do things - even stuff that he can't necessarily personally do, like play the piano, it's really easy to see how it _could_ be done, how you move your fingers and the music comes out the other end. 

The clay on the wheel is a bit different, maybe because of how it spins or maybe because of how the clay changes shape or maybe just . . . for no good reason. Even as Steve watches it happen and sees the logic of cause and effect, it's a bit hard to actually sort of picture or imagine his own hands doing it. For him it's not a big deal, because he doesn't really care. 

Maybe for Bucky that moment of not being able to picture it, to project how it would work, is harder to be comfortable with. And then once he started poking at it, it just sort of gets . . . . stuck in his head, or his head gets stuck on it, and it stops even being just for the sake of figuring it out period, and starts being a need to make it work the way he saw it the first time. 

The thought makes Steve look something up, and he's relieved to find out that yeah, you can get one of the tiny wheels the guy in the video is using. And of course, it occurs to Steve right after he looks, even if you couldn't it's not like he couldn't ask someone at SI to knock one up in probably less time than it takes Steve to make pancakes. But to be honest he tries not to let that kind of thinking get too automatic. If nothing else, that makes it pretty awkward when suddenly you _don't_ have access to that kind of thing anymore. 

 

Steve mostly keeps all of this to himself. He definitely doesn't say anything to Bucky, or give much of an indication he's noticing. Or, Steve has to admit, at least looks like he's trying not to give any indication he's noticing, which at least gets across his point. But somehow, even talking about it to someone else feels both unnecessary and like it'd put . . . to much weight on the situation. At the same time. 

If Bucky decides he hates the whole thing after all, it'll just get put away in a closet or the storage locker. And Steve'll probably have to be a bit careful about Bucky feeling guilty for existing and needing anything for a while, but it's not like he doesn't know how to do that. It's not going to explode, as such. But at the same time it feels very fragile, and like if Steve makes too big a deal about it outside his own head, staying casual and calm about it even inside his own head is going to get really hard. 

He doesn't need that right now. 

So he just sort of . . .waits. Waits to see what's going to happen. 

 

The progression goes like this: 

First, the box the wheel came in disappears. That's kind of a big deal. It's not like the silent message of "no I have definitely not opened and used this" the constant return to the box tried to send wasn't an obvious lie, but that just makes the disappearance more significant. The admission matters: yeah, I'm using this. Steve's kind of pleased about that. 

It stops being the box and the tell-tale tupperware in their place by the little computer-desk and instead turns into just the wheel, cord curled up in place, with the tupperware beside it. The ziplock with the jerry-rigged tools starts living on top of the tupperware's lid. 

Then, the wheel stops being out-of-the-box _clean_ all the time. It's still cleaned up, for sure - but it's an ordinary kind of cleaned up, not one that implies you were trying to pretend it was never used. Same for the tupperware container. It starts being okay if there's a smudge or a fingerprint somewhere on them, and Steve knows it starts being okay because he sees them sometimes. Or signs of clean-up in the sink. 

It stops being like Bucky feels he has to erase every sign that he did something out of the world. And that's good. 

The first piece actually left to dry is a bowl, almost totally nondescript except the way the rim is slightly uneven. Steve kinda likes it, but Bucky's clearly not happy with it - clearly, given that by the time it's as dry as it can get in the condo Steve sees him pick it up, turn it over a few times to look at it, and then put it down and ignore it and then the next time Steve goes out when he comes back it's gone, presumably back into the general supply of clay. 

Steve's also willing to acknowledge he probably has just about as much actual objective critical perception on this one as Bucky used to have with Steve's paintings. Which was slightly more than Steve's _mom_ ever had with Steve's paintings. But not much. 

Then, a piece actually ends up going to the youth and community centre to get fired, and with that, Steve's honestly impressed. He's even more impressed when he establishes that Bucky did in fact go to the centre during opening hours and get it put in line, rather than, say, breaking in and doing it after hours. 

(Bucky gives him a very Patient look. "It takes two days, Steve," he says. "And if the kiln's not full it doesn't heat properly. You can't stealth-fire pottery." While Steve feels that the ease with which this answer came to mind indicates Bucky must've thought about it, he decides to use his discretion.) 

That one becomes Abrikoska's new water-bowl, although that might just be because Steve knocked the old one off the counter by accident a week or two ago and they've been substituting a soup-bowl. After that there's several more pieces that end up drying in the laundry room, up on the shelves that Steve'd used earlier for his seedlings. Four of those make it through being fired (though Steve has no idea what happens to them after that, because they disappear) before Steve ever sees Bucky working on anything. 

 

The first thing he sees Bucky working on isn't even on the wheel: it's the same kind of coil-technique-thing that he'd first seen Bucky trying to use with the self-hardening clay, except working a lot better. 

Bucky's sitting on the floor in the living-room, working on it while he listens to a recorded university lecture on - Steve listens for a second to check - the history of music. Steve's wondered if something as fine as clay, especially when mixed up with water, would get into the joins in Bucky's left hand but apparently not. That makes him really curious, again, as to what Tony's actually made it out of, but he knows he's probably not going to remember to ask when he's also in the mood to listen to Tony explain something, so he lets the thought go by. 

One side of the pot shows that it's made by the coils, and the other side's been kind of smoothed out so you could almost think it was made on the wheels. The frown he's wearing is both one Steve's intensely familiar with, and also one Steve hasn't seen in . . .well. Years, now, however you look at it. The one that goes with concentration but not unhappiness, and also goes with Bucky chewing lightly on the inside of his lip. It comes with a feeling intense enough to make Steve a little bit giddy - not nostalgia, where nostalgia is about something from the past that's mostly lost, but something else, about something from the past that isn't. 

Steve puts a lasagne from Maria into the oven to heat up and comes back out to the living-room in time to see Bucky exhale just short of a sigh, and then use his right hand to roll the whole thing into a ball again. 

"Something not work?" Steve asks, seeing as things've just reached the point where saying nothing is Awkward, but Bucky shakes his head. 

"No, just fucking around with it anyway," he says, and gets up to put it away and then wash his hands. 

 

When Bucky finally lets Steve see him using the wheel, it's like this: 

It's five-fifteen, like usual, and Bucky's been up since quarter to four. Was restless the whole night, asleep and awake and up and down until finally muttering, _it's quarter to four just go the fuck back to sleep for an hour and a half_ as he got up. It's the kind of thing where Steve's sort of accepted the compromise: any longer and he does the same thing he's always done, gets up to make sure Bucky's not sitting alone, but up to an hour and a half, as long as it's not too many days in a row. . . 

Of such compromises is life made. Or some damn thing. 

Steve gets up, yawns and pulls on a t-shirt. Goes to the bathroom on autopilot, splashes water on his face, rinses his mouth out, all of that stuff. Pads down the hallway and veers to the kitchen to get coffee all without taking much in beyond _everything's more or less where it should be_. 

It's only after he's got the coffee and Abrikoska's jumped down and come over to the kitchen to investigate, make sure it's just him, and see whether perhaps by chance he may possibly have decided to put an egg or some other treat in her bowl already, then complain experimentally when he hasn't . . . it's only _after_ that Steve notices Bucky's sitting on the edge of the futon with the pottery wheel on the coffee-table. 

Making something on it. 

It might be some kind of bowl. Or something. As far as Steve can make out. There's lots of things to notice - like, Steve hadn't really thought about how wet clay might spatter, so he hadn't thought about how Bucky might be avoiding that problem, the kind of care that would take, or that one of the ways to get around it would be using one of the blankets that got torn to cover the table, or constantly have a piece of one of the old towels handy to wipe water off his forearms. For that matter, Steve hadn't thought about how there'd be a bowl of water just there for Bucky to continually wet his hands. And things like that.

There's lots of things to notice. Steve basically notices none of them. Not right now, not as he stands here and watches, Bucky as unaware of him as Bucky ever gets and splitting his attention between the clay shaping under his fingers and the K-drama on the screen. 

There's no room in Steve's head for him to notice anything except how jaw-droppingly, mind-burningly _hot_ it is watching Bucky's hands move on the clay. Push against it. Fingers dig into it, shape it, stroke the surface and then press into it. How _incredibly hot_ that is. 

Which it is. 

_Unbelievably._

Jesus. 

This is not something Steve expected. Or expected to have to process at five-fifteen, less than a quarter of his way into the first coffee of the day and sort of completely derailed off three other trains of thought. When it would actually be a _bad_ idea to drop himself down beside Bucky and pull him away even for sex because while that normally counts as positive reinforcement the entire point here is that this, the pottery, is _not about Steve_ , it's about something Bucky's decided to do for whatever damn reason it got stuck in his head, so Steve should definitely not do anything that could accidentally make it about him, and Jesus loving Christ. 

It's basically a good God-damned thing that the right response to the whole thing is in fact not to say anything, not to bring attention to what Bucky's doing, not to make any kind of fuss, and pretend everything is normal. And he can let that take him on autopilot back into the kitchen, to the fridge, to find the damn eggs and make something edible out of them. This is definitely a good thing. 

He does let his forehead knock gently against the closed fridge door, though. And the image isn't going to fade _any time soon_. 

That's something he's going to have to adjust to. The last thing Steve wants to do is _discourage_ the hobby. God, it's even the one Bucky picked up entirely on his own. 

But holy _God_. 

For his part Bucky takes the sound of Steve actually making breakfast as the signal to reduce the clay back to a lump - apparently whatever he was playing with this morning isn't good enough, in his eyes, to keep - and put it away, wipe everything up, rinse out the piece of the old towel in the laundry-nook sink, fold up the blanket, and all in all return the living-room to a state that definitely did not hint that he'd been doing anything with his hands and fingers and clay and pressure of the former on the latter that made making breakfast-based calories happen _before_ luring Bucky back to bed a serious test of Steve's self-discipline. 

Actually, that kind of fails anyway. But they have both at least eaten and put the dishes in the sink before Bucky ends up leaning against the counter and Steve ends up on his knees.


End file.
